The study of the ?eld of user modeling (UM) has resulted in signi?cant amounts of theoretical work, as well as practical experience, in developing UM-based applications in traditional areas of human-computer interaction and tutoring systems. Further, it promises to have an enormous impact on recent developments in areas like information ?ltering, e-commerce, adaptive presentation techniques, and interface agents. A user model is an explicit representation of properties of a particular user, which allows the system to adapt diverse aspects of its performance to individual users'needs. TechniquesforUMhavebeendevelopedandevaluatedbytheoreticiansandpractitioners in a variety of ?elds, including arti?cial intelligence, education, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and human-computer interaction. The International Conferences on User Modeling constitute the major forum for pres- tationanddiscussionofboththelatestdevelopmentsinacademicresearchonallaspects of user modeling and industrial experience in deploying adaptive systems in real-world applications.
This volume contains the proceedings of the Eighth International C- ference on User Modeling (UM2001), held in Sonthofen, Germany. It follows UM99 (Banff,Canada),UM97(Sardinia,Italy),UM96(Hawaii,USA),UM94(Hyannis,USA), UM92(Dagstuhl,WestGermany),UM90(Hawaii,USA)andUM86(MariaLaach,West Germany). Until now, the proceedings of the conference have been published with university p- lishers.AfterdiscussionswithinUMInc.,itwasdecidedfromnowontopublishthep- ceedingsvolumewithoneofthemajorpublishingcompanies,toensurewideravailability of the volume in libraries and archives. After careful consideration Springer-Verlag was chosen. The UM2001 program includes tutorials, invited talks, technical paper and poster s- sions, a doctoral consortium, workshops, and system demonstrations. There were a total of 79 technical submissions from 20 countries.